How con men exploit expats

Richard seemed nice enough. He said he was a heart specialist and travelled the globe performing life-saving surgery when he wasn’t at home in Majorca. Trying to find common ground at the expat soiree, I told him I’d once met Robert Jarvick. Robert who? He hadn’t a clue. And yet surely such a specialist would know of Dr Jarvick, inventor of the artificial heart? Full of suspicion, I googled his name and called a doctor friend in London. It transpired that Richard was a complete fake, a fantasist who worked as a sales rep for a pharmaceutical company in the States. I wasn’t surprised because invention is the greater part of valour in expat land. People with a past and those hungry for a lucrative future, will often change their colours like a chameleon, arriving on foreign shores with a shiny new identity and in search of prey. Fellow expats to be exact.

John Neil Hirst with wife, Linda. Con man or pillar of society?

Fantasists like Richard are fairly harmless. They create new personas to inveigle their way into a group that suits their social pretensions. But the con men, hungry predators usually with a dubious past, are more dangerous. Take financier John Neil Hirst described by several of his victims as a “pillar of society”, a trustworthy Yorkshireman who charmed his way into every expat association, club and charitable enterprise, and attended cricket matches, charity fundraisers and lived a luxurious lifestyle in Majorca. Affable and dependable Hirst was the life and soul of the large and affluent British expat community in the south of the island and before long, was dishing out investment advice to all his new friends, people who knew nothing of his past. Within seven years he had convinced a sizeable group of expats to part with their savings, totaling £20million. How he convinced so many into believing that he could guarantee 20 per cent return on investments-regardless of market conditions-defies belief, but he apparently had a silver tongue and no one bothered to research his background. Had they done, they might have discovered that the self styled financier had spent five years in prison for another investment fraud in the UK. Now he is under investigation by the Serious Fraud Office, having left Majorca in great haste when things turned ugly. But Mr Hirst isn’t a one off. There are con men operating in many sun spots where carefree, trusting expats all too quickly form new friendships with those of their own nationality in an often ersatz and superficial environment. Little Britains are created in which people form fast and fragile relationships built on shifting sands. Only the other day an English retiree lamented to me that through some expat chums she had employed a British builder to fit her kitchen, giving him a significant chunk of money up front for other house improvements. Having pocketed the money he disappeared without a trace. Had she checked him out before hiring him? Of course not, because she thought he was bone fide. A nice, honest chap. One of us. I bumped into Richard, the fantasy heart surgeon, recently in Palma. Breezily he mentioned that he was off to Argentina to perform a tricky operation on a senior government minister. I wished him luck. After all, it would have seemed churlish to do otherwise. Return to the Expat page